


pieces of a broken hourglass

by Lleavingwonderland



Series: a word that sometimes you cannot say [2]
Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types, Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan, The Heroes of Olympus - Rick Riordan
Genre: Angst, Depression, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Percy turns 17 but god at what cost, Post-Tartarus (Percy Jackson), Post-The Blood of Olympus (Heroes of Olympus), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Survivor Guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-11
Updated: 2020-07-11
Packaged: 2021-03-05 06:01:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25209646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lleavingwonderland/pseuds/Lleavingwonderland
Summary: ""To the outside eye nothing is wrong. And nothing really is, Percy thinks, but nothing’s really right either. Because what’s wrong isn’t to be found in the cabinets and closets of his mom's apartment—the problem is him. His life fits back on him like an old jacket that shrunk in the wash—it’s too tight across the shoulders, the zipper wont budge. Despite his best efforts to convince himself otherwise—this time is different. This year will not be bounced back from. Because now there’s long silences and phrases like “what do you want?” and “what do you need?” and a lot of times those only make more silences because he doesn’t know.He doesn’t know. ""or Percy is home after hoo and is struggling with the whole 'being alive' thing.
Relationships: Annabeth Chase/Percy Jackson
Series: a word that sometimes you cannot say [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1826383
Comments: 14
Kudos: 149





	pieces of a broken hourglass

**Author's Note:**

> "I'm sifting through the sand, looking for pieces of broken hourglass, trying to get it all back, put it back together, as if the time had never passed" (from bishops knife trick by fall out boy)

Percy arrives back in New York on August 1st and walks through the door of his apartment for the first time in seven and a half months on August 2nd. It’s astounding to him how quickly everything snaps back into place around him, how quickly tasks pile up as soon as he resumes his life. To the outside eye nothing is wrong. _And nothing really is_ , Percy thinks, _but nothing’s really right either_. Because what’s wrong isn’t to be found in the cabinets and closets of his mom's apartment—the problem is him. His life fits back on him like an old jacket that shrunk in the wash—it’s too tight across the shoulders, the zipper wont budge. Despite his best efforts to convince himself otherwise—this time is different. This year will not be bounced back from. Because now there’s long silences and phrases like _I want_ and _I need_ (“what do you want?” “what do you need?”) and a lot of times those only make more silences because he doesn’t know.

He doesn’t know.

He hasn’t been home that long when his birthday comes around. (“What do you want to do on your birthday?”) And he says, “maybe we could just get takeout,” because he’s not thinking about turning seventeen or having been with Annabeth for a year. He’s thinking about Silena’s corroded face and Michael’s abandoned bow and Ethan falling into nothing and how they were supposed to call it a victory afterwards.

It’s been a year. So much has changed. They can’t be forgotten.

_god, how has it only been a year?_

On August 18th, he wakes up and doesn’t want to get out of bed. It was all he thought about the last few days, feeling like it was getting darker and darker.

It’s hard to celebrate your birthday when you feel guilty for being alive.

He stays in bed. And stays and stays and stays, until his mom offers a tentative knock on the door, saying it’s late, asking if he wants lunch.

He doesn’t.

His mom knocks again, can she come in?

She can and she does.

And she can see Percy laying on top of his bed, all the covers pushed aside in the heat, eyes a thousand miles away, joints tanned and prominent, skin still scarring and scabbing from slices and burns. He hasn’t moved since he woke. The blinds are still drawn. He doesn’t look at her.

“What’s wrong, baby?” she asks

_What’s wrong? It’s been a year. I saw Luke die in front of me. Friends of mine are dead. Kids I didn’t ever get to know are dead. Leo is dead. That fucker Octavian is dead. And I’m alive._

_I’m alive._

It would be easier to ask what’s right: a list so short it doesn’t exist.

He wants to put this dark slurry of guilt and emotion and memory into words that will explain to his mom why he’s still laying in bed, without making the lines on her forehead deepen with worry. He’s tired of hurting her. He’s tired of hurting. Period.

He knows he’s been silent too long when she reappears (he hadn’t even registered that she left) with a glass of water and a piece of fruit, which she sets on his nightstand.

"Can you sit up and at least eat and drink?”

He doesn’t want to. He really does not want to. But, he also feels guilty that he’s acting like this and his mom is having to bring him the world’s shittiest breakfast in bed because he literally can’t make himself get up.

It’s so dark in here. Opening the blinds won’t help.

He sits up, bare feet gently scraping the floor and does as he’s told.

“What can I do?” she asks.

He shakes his head. He can’t even fix this. How could anyone else?

He doesn't want them to. He doesn’t want them to. He wants to fight this battle himself. He’s not even sure what he’s fighting, because right now breathing feels like fighting and the sadness feels like truth.

He hardly wants to struggle. He just wants to lay here.

Percy is neither a scientist nor a philosopher. When he asks _why_ it’s normally because he doesn’t get along well with authority, not because of deep rooted teenage existentialism. ‘Because I said so’ is the worst possible reason for anything. Always has been. And now it seems like the only answer, it just keeps ringing around.

_Why do I exist?_

Because Poseidon said so.

_Why did I survive the war?_

Because Nico said so.

_And why am I not dead now?_

Because the fates said so and because Hera said so and because Gaea said so.

_And why am I sitting in a sun washed room drinking lukewarm water?_

Because my mom said so.

He feels like a passive participant in his own life.

It’s not fair that he’s alive to be sad on his birthday when so many others aren’t. He feels like an ingrate, like he’s the last one to deserve this.

He falls back into a twilight sleep and wakes up untold hours later with a piercing headache.

His mom comes in around what must be dinner time, the shadows have shifted.

“Are you ok?” she asks.

Pointless question. He can’t respond.

“Are you hungry?” she asks.

He shakes his head, mumbles a negative.

She stands there. Stands and stands, arms crossed looking intently at him.

He wants her to leave, but doesn’t want to have to say the words _get out of my room_.

God his head hurts. And his mouth is dry. And his hips and his shoulders protest laying prone all day.

“Can you at least come in the living room?” she asks.

“Why?”

She sighs softly. “Because you shouldn’t lay in here all day.”

He knows she’s right. He knows she’s right, but for some reason the 15 feet between his room and the couch seem like a marathon to his fatigue. He can feel the guilt eating him already. And the inner standoff between the part of him that just wants to slip slide back into inky sleep, and the part of him that knows he slept all day and will likely be awake long into the night now.

His mom is still standing in the doorway, watching him. Part of him feels like shit for dragging her through this—she finally gets her kid back home and he’s not even a real person anymore. She’s so patient. She cares for him and asks after him and offers him sentiments he somehow can’t wrap his hands around. Things like ‘I love you’ and ‘it’s ok’ and ‘it’s not your fault’ and ‘it’s over now’ and ‘we’re gonna get through this’.

He feels like he doesn’t deserve her. Or her love. Or the quiet patience of his step dad. He doesn’t want to ruin her evening by laying wordlessly on the couch, or even worse by being roped into sitting at the dinner table to push food around on a plate and make light familiar conversation.

“No,” he says and doesn’t really know why.

He looks away so he doesn’t have to see her worry or sadness.

Sometimes he wishes she would just get angry at him, scream at him the way his brain is screaming all the time.

But of course she doesn’t because she’s better than him. She steps away and he listens to her footsteps as she goes.

He’s so relived today was the start of Annabeth’s school year. He couldn’t face seeing her.

“Happy birthday,” she says when he picks up the phone, not sounding very happy.

“How was class?” he responds, not sounding very happy either.

“I didn’t go,” she says.

There’s silence then and Percy just keeps thinking _it’s been a year_. It’s been a year and it’s also been less than a month. There are too many sorrows to speak aloud.

“Sorry I didn’t call earlier,” she says.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“Why?” she asks.

He doesn’t know.

They’ll see each other this weekend.

Maybe things will be different (better) then.

They won’t. They won't.

He’ll still be alive. For some unjust, inexplicable reason.

Something that he hasn’t fully learned about the darkness in his brain yet—though he will—is that it comes and goes. Every day of the week of August 18th is cast in a dim grayscale in which he wakes up too late and hardly showers and hardly eats and spends the afternoon sleeping off his tiredness. But two days after his birthday he wakes up oddly early feeling wide awake. He can’t pick out what it is, maybe it's that he slept through the night, maybe its the light filtering through the blinds. He hears Paul making coffee in the kitchen and realizes how hungry he is. It makes sense—he tries to think back. He thinks that all he ate yesterday was a banana and a protein bar that his mom handed him and refused to leave until he ate, but he cant really remember.

He joins Paul, who pours him a cup of coffee, in the kitchen and his mom emerges shortly thereafter, wrapping Percy in a hug, the edges of sleep still clinging to her as she, too, accepts a cup of coffee.

Percy in short order starts eating his way through the kitchen—cereal and yogurt and toast and fruit—a four course meal of low effort breakfast staples, as his mom looks on in amazement.

“Glad to see you’re doing better today,” she says.

He nods, shrugs. He’s better today, but he doesn’t want to talk about it. He doesn’t know why, and he doesn’t want to be held to something that might not last.

It does last—but only through the evening—long enough for him to actually shower and clean his room. The wheels come off when he tries to work on a summer assignment for school.

His head is swimming. He reads the instructions on the packet over and over and over and has no idea what they said. The words are there. He sees them. He just can’t manage to understand what they mean when organized in a sentence. And his brain is getting louder and louder, but more like tv static than anything useful.

He’s a shit student. Always has been. _At some point it’s just stupid to keep trying_.

He drops it all in the floor and stares at the wall and just lets his mind go. By the time his mom tries to get him to participate in dinner the melancholy has settled back over him like fifty pounds of armor. A barrier to the outside world—attacks and embraces alike.

He slumps in his chair.

He eats the pasta like it might be poison and can’t make himself finish it.

His mom saves the rest in a container. “We don’t want that to go to waste.”

He doesn’t either, it’s just that he also can’t do anything about it.

He lays in bed scrolling through the same two websites on his computer like a zoo animal pacing its cage, not even really noticing what he’s doing. He’s exhausted, but the last thing he wants to do is sleep.

It’s all so fucking frustrating.

He drops his computer unceremoniously in the floor and closes his eyes.

When Annabeth comes over that weekend its a casual affair. And by casual that is to say they don’t talk much and Percy feels tired the entire time. He feels tired when Annabeth kisses him and tired when she hugs his mom and tired when his mom asks about school and Annabeth gives a summary of her classes. And he feels tired when he says ‘happy one year’ and he feels ashamed and shitty and frustrated that he can’t even be genuine about that. Because he is happy to be with her.

He is. _He is._

Annabeth is still walking with a slight limp even though she tries to hide it. Her ankle never really healed right after Rome. He doesn’t mention it. Neither does she.

And Percy is neither a scientist nor a philosopher, but he knows he didn’t used to feel like this. Maybe it’s just part of growing up: seeing the world as it really is. Maybe it’s just darker for him because he sees more than most. Maybe all heroes feel this way, then they die young with no time to rationalize it.

Percy doesn’t think he wants to die. But he doesn’t really feel strongly about it one way or the other most days. He’s seen the dead and the underworld. He knows no rest is waiting for him there.

There’s no rest on either side of the river.

It’s seven in the morning on September 7th, just weeks into Percy’s junior year. The ache of being alive starts to wrap around his chest and constrict in less time than it takes for Percy to stand up and walk into the bathroom. It’s all over. He wants to write the day off. He wants to crawl back into bed. He doesn’t want to look in the mirror.

He puts on his school uniform feeling like a fraud and an impostor: everyone can take one look at him and see that he’s broken and a basket-case and a terrible person and a coward—that he managed to eke out a life he didn’t even want and not cry for his dead friends.

 _I didn’t mean for it to go this way,_ he thinks. But it doesn’t matter. His intentions have never mattered.

He’s running late because of course he is so he stands at the counter staring at the toaster for far too long until it finally pops, bread blackened and inedible.

And somehow that’s the final straw. Less than an hour of being awake and the emotional labor of burning toast is too much already.

Tears burn in his eyes and shame burns in his throat.

He can’t even bring himself to hurl the toast in the garbage even though he’s out of the notion of eating. So he just stands there, tall and dressed for the day and utterly pathetic, knowing that the minutes are ticking by getting him closer and closer to a detention for excessive tardiness.

God bless his mom and her affectionate glasses of water, but she’s out of her depth. She was much more accustomed to visits to the principal’s office and calls from teachers than a son who can’t pull himself together to get to school. But she’s trying. She’s trying and he has no right to be angry at her. He’s not, not really. He’s angry at himself and the entire universe. He tames his shaking fingers around the glass and raises it carefully to his lips. She lays a careful hand on his shoulders.

“Ok?” she asks.

“I’m gonna be late,” he says, avoiding the question. The clock on the stove says 7:39.

“I’ll drive you,” she offers.

He shakes his head, taking deep breaths and smudging tears across his face with the heel of his hand. They both know there isn’t actually time to battle traffic into Queens and get him to school on time. he’s already going to be late taking the subway as it is.

She wraps him in a hug that he’s too weak to protest and holds on tight. “I love you,” she reminds him.

“Love you, too,” he manages.

“You’re gonna make it,” she says.

He’s not.

He picks up his keys from the table and shoves them in his pocket. They won’t go in right, they keep catching on the fabric. He wants to scream.

The entire commute is a blur. He’s on a southbound train pressed up against strangers and he really doesn’t remember any of the walking and waiting and scanning his metro card. He’s just there. Somehow.

He goes to school and is there. Then he goes home and is there.

Some days, most days, being there is as good as it gets.

If mornings are roulette then evenings are a scheduled battle—or Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill—both deeply resigned and incredibly frustrated. The metaphor doesn’t play out though: is the rock education, emotions, family life, the weight of existence? There are a lot of rocks to be had—Percy often feels like he’s caught in an avalanche. Then after being crushed under all of them he has to brush his teeth, go to bed, and do it again the next day.

He doesn’t want to go to sleep because of the nightmares.

He doesn’t want to go to sleep because of the alarm clock.

He doesn’t want to go to sleep because that will mean the day is over and the next one is coming and there’s nothing he can do about it.

He submits to it because he has no choice, tiredness bows him over the desk where he’s working on remedial algebra II. He wakes up long enough to turn out the light and drag himself to bed in a stupor, knowing he’ll regret it the next day when the homework is due.

Hopeful endings are great. Happy endings are even better, but real life doesn’t have endings. It has sunsets. And the sun comes right back up the next day. It doesn’t close or stop. Time rushes onward, dragging Percy with it and his exhaustion with him. He used to think he wanted a happy ending at the end of his heroic journey, but now that he’s at the end he just wants to pause everything. To be alone in a silent world where he can stay long enough to make the broken bits inside him start ticking again, then hit the ‘play’ button on reality when he’s equipped to bear it.

It doesn’t matter what he wants, though, because he has to work with what he gets. And what he gets is the sound of his four alarms pulling him unwilling and unprepared out of unconsciousness. And what he gets is enough homework to kill him. And what he gets is every ADHD symptom he had in middle school bolded and dialed to eleven.

And what he gets is waking up feeling like he’ll never be happy again. 

He doesn’t get a choice about the sunrise, he doesn’t get a choice about his past, he doesn’t even get a choice about his brain chemistry: the only thing he gets to control is himself.

So he tries.

And keeps trying, again and again.


End file.
